Azure News 2017 – Week 31

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Azure Connectivity Check, Azure ISO certifications, Azure Container Instances, Accelerated Networking, App Service Domains and more on the latest edition of the Need to Know podcast.

Wow, it’s week 31 already, where is time going, time is getting away from us.

The Networking Watcher team is excited to announce connectivity check in Public preview! You can now use Network Watcher to test a direct TCP connection from a virtual machine, to a:

virtual machine

FQDN

URI

IPv4 address.

Complex networking configurations can make troubleshooting connectivity problems challenging. With Network Watcher Connectivity Check, we help you reduce the amount of time it takes to detect connectivity problems or configuration issues. Connectivity Check helps you tell the source of connectivity issue when it occurs. You can access it now via Portal, PowerShell, Azure CLI, and REST API.

Microsoft Azure leads the industry in ISO certifications

We are happy to announce that Microsoft Azure recently completed a new set of independent third-party ISO and Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) audits to expand our certification portfolio. Azure leads the industry with the most comprehensive compliance coverage, enabling customers to meet a wide range of regulatory obligations. If that were not enough, having a program with industry leading depth and coverage specific to ISO is exponentially useful to our customers globally as ISO standards provide baselines for information security management that are relied upon by many other standards across regulated industries and markets worldwide.

Fast and Easy Containers: Azure Container Instances

Containers have fundamentally changed the way developers develop their applications, the way applications are deployed and the way system administrators manage their environments. Containers offer a broadly accepted and open standard, enabling simple portability between platforms and between clouds. Recently announced is a new Azure service that makes it even easier to deploy containers. The very first service of its kind in the cloud, Azure Container Instances (ACI) is a new Azure service delivering containers with great simplicity and speed and without any Virtual Machine infrastructure to manage. ACIs are the fastest and easiest way to run a container in the cloud.

An Azure Container Instance is a single container that starts in seconds and is billed by the second. ACI offer highly versatile sizing, allowing you to select the exact amount of memory separate from the exact count of vCPUs, so your application perfectly fits on the infrastructure. Your containers won’t be billed for a second longer than is required and won’t use a GB more than is needed. With ACI, containers are a first-class object of the Azure platform, offering Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) on the instance and billing tags to track usage at the individual container level. As the service directly exposes containers, there is no VM management you need to think about or higher-level cluster orchestration concepts to learn. It is simply your code, in a container, running in the cloud.

Microsoft Azure is pleased to announce a series of performance optimisations supporting the latest distributions of Linux (Ubuntu, Red Hat, CentOS) and Windows for all virtual machine (VM) sizes, providing up to 25 Gbps of networking throughput.

25Gbps bandwidth is currently the fastest published speed between VMs in the public cloud.

These optimisations have been deployed to the entire Azure computing fleet.

Azure App Service Domains

Announcing the preview of App Service domain. App Service domain (preview) gives you a first class experience in the Azure portal to create and manage domains that will be hosted on Azure DNS for your Azure services such as Web Apps, Traffic Manager, Virtual Machines, and more.

Here are some benefits to using App Service domains:

Subdomain management and assignment

Auto-renew capabilities

Free cancellation within the first five days

Better security, performance, and reliability using Azure DNS

‘Privacy Protection’ included for free except for TLDs who’s registry does not support privacy such as .co.in, .co.uk, etc.